Zhu Wen makes a laughingstock out of China

Zhu Wen's book, a collection of best-selling satires that adroitly chronicles life in contemporary China, was written in a kind of page-ripping frenzy

By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

I LOVE DOLLARS

By Zhu Wen228 pagesColumbia

It's a commonly paraded view that over the last decade China's exclusive preoccupation with getting rich has eroded traditional values just as effectively as the Cultural Revolution did 40 years ago. In this book, a collection of some of his best-selling satires dating from the 1990s, maverick writer Zhu Wen (朱文) turns this sad situation into high comedy. Maybe he thinks the state of affairs is too tragic to contemplate directly, but when a son's Confucian reverence manifests itself in trekking round Beijing searching for nubile young girls for his father to sleep with, or manipulating his dad's penis for 15 pages so that he can urinate into a plastic hospital bottle, you realize the truth of a maxim attributed to Karl Marx -— things that first appear as tragedy tend to manifest themselves the second time round as farce.

Great satire — think of Swift or Kurt Vonnegut — has frequently been outlandishly comic on the surface while barely managing to disguise the despair at human stupidity and viciousness that lies underneath. These six stories are very much in this tradition, except that the comedy is so manic that you need to be nudged now and again before you're aware of the serious indignation at China's newfound commercialism that's also part of the author's world-view.

Most people, if they've heard of Wen at all, know him as a film director. His 2001 feature Seafood (海鮮) won the Grand Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and South of the Clouds (雲的南方) was awarded the NETPAC Prize at the Berlin Festival in 2004. But after working in a power plant for five years after graduating, his first break into fame, in 1994, was with books. The novella I Love Dollars (我愛美元), with its explicit sexuality and relentless absurdity, was a run-away popular success all over China. It's now the title story in this new English-language collection.

Among the first things that need to be said about this admirable publication from Columbia is that the translation and introduction, both by Cambridge University's Julia Lovell, couldn't be of higher quality. To illustrate how she manages to pen colloquial comic prose, consider the following, surprising from an academic: "How the hell had I ended up with this psychotic girlfriend? And then I was struck, stirred, even more powerfully than usual, by the sway of her perfect, rounded buttocks. I hung back behind, making silent plans to unite our contradictions before dinner."

Wen's essential position is that China is turning into one enormous shopping mall. To give consumption its full rein, all traditional restraints have been driven away. Money "erodes our self-restraint only to make us realize we never had any in the first place." Goods are cheap and the people are cheaper still. "Better to be Father than me, me than my son, my son than my grandson. Whenever I see a baby, my heart fills with pity. Why so late, unlucky child?"

The belief that things are constantly getting worse, plus hatred for a meretricious present, may be characteristic viewpoints of the old everywhere, but they frequently characterize satire at its highest level too, as they do in these fine stories.

Wen is smart enough to portray himself as just as cheapened by the pervading commercialism as everyone else. "I knew full well my tears were cheap, as were my emotions," he writes. "I was a cheap person, in an age that burned to sell cheap, my natural habitat the clearance warehouse, pushed carelessly to the end of a shelf, happy to write for anyone who tossed me a couple of coins."